From Imagine: 100 Ban Fracking Now! Protesters Inside the Inauguration of Governor Gas Wolf (A Response to Sam Bernhardt of Food and Water Watch): Among the best moments of Tom Wolfs inauguration was being able to get up in the middle of his first speech as Pennsylvania governor and shoot a dozen pictures of history when a friend and ally--who has worked tirelessly for his fellows to end the catastrophe that is fracking--stood up for us all to demand it be banned. For that act of courage, he was arrested while Governor Gas Wolf looked smugly on. This act of nonviolent civil disobedience is made all the more striking by comparison to the fact that the main organizers of the protest going on outside the inaugural venue cannot even bring themselves to whisper the word ban, let alone call for one--although they affect a pretense to being serious about doing something about fracking--using words like halt or moratorium just well enough that many well-intended folks are bamboozled. Dont get me wrong. There were a couple of hundred of committed, well-meaning people just outside in the designated free speech zone assigned to protest. They were loud. They were awesome. And even though news station WBRE completely ignored them, you could not fail to hear folks chanting Ban Fracking Now! in the background of the governors address. These are good folks who spent their own time and money thinking that theyre doing something right. Its the organizers of that action who must be called out--for the sake of the folks above. I have thought long and hard about this, and I think the only conclusions that can be drawn about: 1. why the word ban has been effectively banned 2. why these so-called leaders werent inside risking arrest with the rest of us are that while the leaders of Pennsylvanians Against Fracking (PAF), Food and Water Watch (FWW), Clean Water Action (CWA)--and even the august Delaware River Keepers (DRK) are happy to see other people do the hard work and absorb the hard consequences entailed by acts of civil disobedience, they have 1. Neither the stomach for what they know must be undertaken as nonviolent civil disobedience to end the conversion of the state into an industrialized gas factory, 2. Nor the guts to see that the harms perpetrated by this industry are part and parcel of a system that advantages them. 3. Nor the foresight to see that legal victories--like those of the DRK concerning cumulative impacts ignored by the Federal Regulatory Energy Commission (FERC)--are pyrrhic. Their ultimate effect is instruction to the gas companies about how to draft an airtight application next time. 4. Nor the conviction that fracking really could be ended. If they held any or all of 1-4, theyd have been inside the inaugural venue getting ready to call out the words BAN FRACKING NOW! instead of speechifying, jostling for mic time, or schmoozing it up with Josh Fox. Imagine what could have been accomplished had 100 people been inside that venue demanding a ban at the top of their lungs. Imagine that news story. thewrenchphilosleft.blogspot/2015/01/imagine-100-ban-fracking-now-protesters.html
Posted on: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 13:11:07 +0000
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